The Lonely Hearts Club (11 page)

Jo’s 22nd Birthday Party

The Delancey

New York City

“I can’t wait to put this on my phone!” Lola calls out as she walks out with her mother. I make a mental inventory of just how many of those songs are inappropriate for children.

Most of them.

“Aren’t these fabulous?” my mother asks, handing me a vanilla cupcake with buttercream frosting. “I had them made specially for you from that French bakery on the Miracle Mile.”

“Aren’t you planning Andrew’s wedding?” I ask. “Isn’t that keeping you busy enough?”

“But you’re my
daughter
,” she says, dragging the word “daughter” out into two words so that it almost sounds as if she has an English accent. “It’s
your
birthday.”

I know that what she is saying is true. I know that she loves me so much it hurts, and that she would do anything in the world for me. I
also
know that she fancies herself a real Martha Stewart, albeit more law-abiding, and would not miss an opportunity to plan an expensive, over-the-top wedding.

“Barbie’s mom isn’t letting you have anything to do with the wedding plans?”

“No,” my mom says. “She’s absolutely horrible.” She looks like she’s fighting back tears when she says this, and for a moment, I actually feel sorry for her.

But that doesn’t last long. The next minute, I remember that I’m a loser—no job, no freelance gig, no boyfriend, no music career, and I’ve just turned twenty-two. I’ve graduated college, so there’s no more excuses. I’m a loser.

“For the birthday girl,” the leader of the band says, “we’ve got a surprise.”

A surprise? Hasn’t this whole night been surprise enough? I find Chloe across the room and our eyes lock.

“Dr. Waldman,” he says. “Get your ass up here!” Why is the lead singer of Cakewalk directing my dad’s ass to be anywhere? The crowd goes crazy, and a few of my friends from
high school even start chanting my father’s name. Chloe’s prom date in particular—formerly the quarterback of the football team, now a three-hundred-pound electronics salesman—seems to be going wild with anticipation.

“Marty! Marty! Marty!”

My father climbs up on stage and gets behind the electric keyboard.

“I’m used to playing on a baby grand,” he quips, “but this will have to do.” The crowd explodes in laughter, with my mom leading the charge. She has climbed up onto one of the benches and is cheering like a groupie.

“This is dedicated to Jo,” my father says. “Happy birthday, Pumpkin.”

The drummer clicks his sticks together and they begin doing a cover of Tom Jones’s “She’s a Lady.”

“Do you think your dad would hook me up with the lead singer of the band?” Chloe asks.

“I don’t know,” I say. “Why don’t you throw your underwear up on the stage and find out?”

“I think your mother’s got that one covered,” she says and I look at my mother. It’s impossible to stay angry with her, as cute as she looks dancing on the bench with her black leather pants and Chanel Spectators on. She asked both Chloe and me, separately, of course, if she looked “downtown enough” in her little ensemble.

“I really should be more drunk for this,” I say, pouring myself another shot of vodka from the slide. I consider for a moment if it would be bad form to squat in front of the vodka slide and just chug until I pass out.

“Girls! Get up here!” my mother calls out, looking at Chloe and me.

Absolutely not
, I mouth back to her. And then to Chloe: “Is my humiliation not complete?”

“If you can’t beat them,” Chloe says, “join them.”

“Never,” I say. “I’m such a loser.”

“Then admit defeat. If you won’t do it for your mother, do it for your dad. Think about how many gigs he’s come to for you over the years. He’s really tearing it up.”

“He is,” I say, and I can’t help but smile. He
is
tearing it up. My dad is totally in his element—playing like I’d never seen him before, nailing each key and dancing along with the music. And the band actually seems to enjoy having him up there.

I grab another shot of vodka in one hand, Chloe’s hand in the other, and jump up onto the bench with my mom. The three of us dance as we sing along with the lyrics.

“‘She’s a lady,’” we sing. “‘Whoooooa, she’s a lady...’”

Chloe is right. If you can’t beat them, join them. After all, my actual birthday isn’t until tomorrow. I can always be angry about how pathetic my life is then.

12 - Owner of a Lonely Heart

Valentine’s Day. February fourteenth. A day of love and romance and frills and doilies. A day filled with chocolate in heart-shaped boxes and all things pink and red.

Valentine’s Day is the day on which lovers freely express their passion for each other by sending flowers, candies, and insipid love notes. Lots of love notes. According to the Greeting Card Association, approximately one
billion
Valentines are sent every year, making it the biggest card-giving holiday besides Christmas.

Dozens of red roses are sent on this day and hundreds of couples get engaged. Radio stations play love songs and bakeries bake heart-shaped cookies. February fourteenth is a day dedicated entirely to the pursuit of love.

It’s also the day that five of Al Capone’s men gunned down seven members of Bugs Moran’s gang with tommy guns in a garage on Chicago’s north side in 1929. But people usually don’t send cards for that.

It being Valentine’s Day, and me being alone, I do what any respectable single woman who’s utterly alone would do—I open a bottle of Stoli and order in some fried food from my local Italian place.

“That’ll be $32.15,” the hostess says after she’s tallied up my dinner delivery order.

“But I get the same thing every time,” I say, pouring my first vodka tonic of the evening. I pour way too much vodka into the glass, making it stronger than I intend it to be, but I’m not exactly drinking it for the taste this evening. “Isn’t it $18 and change?”

“Oh,” she says, “yeah, normally it is, but there’s an extra charge on all of the menu items for Valentine’s Day.”

“What?” I say, since I must have misheard her. There’s no way in hell this girl just told me that even though I’m ordering in for one, she’s charging me extra because it’s Valentine’s Day. In fact, since I’m ordering for one and it’s Valentine’s Day, shouldn’t I get a
discount
instead of a price increase? The whole situation really brings out my Irish. Being a Jewish girl from Long Island, I don’t really have much Irish in me, but it brings it out nonetheless.

“Oh,” she says. “I was just saying that there’s an extra charge on all of the menu items for Valentine’s Day.”

“But I ordered for one,” I say, pacing around my kitchen with my glass as I speak. “Clearly I’m alone and it’s Valentine’s Day.”

“Yeah,” she says. “I know. It’s just that there’s an extra charge on all of the menu items for Valentine’s Day.”

“I heard you,” I say. I take a big gulp of vodka.

“Okay, yeah, so it should be there in about twenty minutes,” she says, trying to get me off the phone.

“I ordered for one.”

Dead silence on the line.

“I’d like to speak to a manager,” I say, polishing off my first glass in just one large gulp.

“Um, okay,” she says. “Hold on.”

“Hi there,” the manager’s cheery voice announces, as I’m pouring vodka tonic number two. To call this one a vodka tonic would be a bit of a misnomer. Glass number two is more like a vodka with a splash of tonic. “I’m Greg. I’m the manager here.”

“Hi, Greg,” I say as I sit at the kitchen counter and swirl the glass to mix my drink. “I understand that it’s Valentine’s Day and that means that you have to gouge the eyes out of all the lovesick puppies who come into your restaurant tonight. I would do the exact same thing, Greg. The same thing. I mean, fuck them, okay? Fuck ’em, Greg. But I am home—alone—ordering for one. How
dare
you charge me extra for my goddamned Caesar salad and chicken parm. Tonight of all nights. I mean, what the fuck, Greg? What the fuck?”

“You are absolutely right, miss,” Manager Greg says to me as I down the second glass of vodka. “I’m so sorry.”

My Caesar salad and chicken parm arrive hot on my doorstep twenty minutes later, and the delivery guy presents me with the bill. I glance at the bill, ready to pay, but then I notice something. It’s not a bill for the usual amount—it’s a bill for the jacked-up Valentine’s Day price.

“I’m not paying this,” I say, handing back the bill to the delivery guy.

“Um,” he says, shifting his weight from foot to foot. “Whaddya mean?”

“I mean you can tell Manager Greg to go fuck himself,” I say.

“Um, wait? What?”

I hand the delivery guy a tip. “This is for you. You can tell Manager Greg I’m not paying for this. If he has a problem with that, he can come up here himself.” I grab the bag of food just before I slam the door.

I barely even taste the chicken parm. Minutes later, I realize that I must have eaten—the takeout container’s empty—but it’s like I didn’t even have a bite. Anger coursing through my veins, my face getting hotter by the second, barely processing a thought. Just seeing red. Blinding red. I look down at the takeout container and realize I’m still hungry.

But I don’t want to eat. I want to rage.

Put it into a song
, I tell myself.
Get it out with your music
.

But the words don’t come. There’s no structure, no rhyme or reason—I just want to scream at the top of my lungs for a while. To blow off steam.

A tear comes to my eye as I think about everything that’s happened to me in the past few months. All the things that I’ve lost, all the things that were totally out of my control. The job, the guy, the freelance gig, the wedding.

The guy. My eyes burn as I force the tears back, refuse to let them out.

I look at my computer across the room, its black cursor against the pale white screen flashing in the dark. Talking to me. Beckoning to me. Write. Get it all out.

So I do.

Part Two: Dog Days are Over

“You can’t carry it with you if you want to survive”

13 - Love Stinks

I’m sleeping on the couch, one too many Valentine’s Day vodka tonics heavy in my belly, when I hear my answering machine across the room.

“This is some seriously antisocial stuff, Jo-Jo,” Andrew says in the distance. “If you’re not out killing people at random, call me back.”

I don’t know if I’m dreaming it or if he’s really just left me a message, but I’m too tired to even try to figure it out. As I determine that it doesn’t really matter whether or not Andrew left me a message, the phone rings again, leading me to the undeniable conclusion that I’m actually half awake.

“Why are you so angry at Walt Disney?” Chloe says into my answering machine.

“What?” I say, grabbing at the portable phone that’s on my coffee table and turning it on.

“‘Fuck Disney.’ That’s what you said,” Chloe says. “You said, ‘We grew up on Walt Disney, believing him when he assured us that “someday” our prince would come. He made us think that love was that one kiss that could bring you back to life, when in reality, love makes you feel just like Bambi, after his mother gets shot.’ Kind of harsh, don’t you think?”

“What are you talking about?” I say, rubbing the sleep out of my eyes and sitting up on the couch. My laptop is still turned on, sitting on my coffee table, staring at me like a one-night stand you’d really wish would just leave your apartment already. “When did I say that?”

“Just now,” Chloe says, “on your blog. Well, on your old band’s blog anyway. And on Facebook. And Twitter. And Instagram, probably, but I haven’t checked that yet. I thought I told
you that it wasn’t healthy to try to revisit the past like that?” As Chloe is still talking, I flip through my computer’s index of Web sites recently visited. “You said, ‘There was a man I loved. A man I loved more than anything in the world. More than anyone I’ve ever loved before. After two and a half years together, that man tore my heart out and didn’t look back. And the worst part is that I didn’t even see it coming. I thought that I had love, but I now realize that there’s just no such thing.’ No such thing as love? Jo, are you even listening to me?”

“I’m listening,” I say, as I hop onto my band’s old Web site. It takes a few seconds to load, but I’m soon on the blog page, clicking around. My words are staring me right back in the face. My drunken, angry thoughts that were meant to be kept to myself are there on the screen, apparently there for all the world to see.

I was never particularly computer savvy, so when I wrote all of my deepest, darkest secrets on the blog, I just assumed that since the site wasn’t really active anymore, they’d just stay there for me, password protected. But in my vodka-tonic-induced haze, I must have somehow posted it so that anyone who hopped on the site could see it. “I’m just trying to figure out how I posted this stupid thing and how to unpost it. I didn’t mean for it to be public. Anyway, they’re the drunken ramblings of a lonely idiot who’s alone on Valentine’s Day.”

“‘I see couples,’” Chloe parrots back to me. “‘Everywhere I look, everywhere I go. Happy couples in love. The city’s just lousy with them. The only consolation I have when I see these lovesick puppies is that they are just mere moments from being as hopeless and angry as I am. They are one gold stiletto, one bottle of wine away from having their worlds cave in on them. From being buried alive in their own misery. Because I know something that they don’t yet know: It won’t last. It never does.’”